'Such Violence. And Such Repose'

“Naturally the mind suffers when it hears talk of so many horrors, but at my age, knowing that I am useless, I find solace in my books and my philosophy, as though it were a matter of ancient history. Besides, everything that is happening in the world is out of the ordinary.” 

George Santayana was by nature a spectator, not a participant. He likely never knew the urge to revel in the role of activist and was content to remain an observer. “Not that Santayana had to cultivate detachment,” writes Joseph Epstein; “he seems to have been born with it, the way other people are born with, say, large feet.” The philosopher’s stance irritates those who confuse the roles of thinkers and doers, and automatically distrust the former. The letter quoted above was written on this date, August 13, in 1943, to his nephew, José Sastre González. Since July 19, the Allies had been conducting bombing raids on Rome, where Santayana had lived since 1941 in the Hospital and Convent of the Blue Nuns of the Little Company of Mary. He was seventy-nine.

 

During that first raid, five-hundred American bombers had dropped 1,168 tons of bombs on the city. Santayana reassures his nephew: “If a bomb should fall here it would be by chance and I do believe that we will come out of the war unharmed.” On the day Santayana is writing, more than three-hundred Allied aircraft dropped bombs on the city, killing more than three-hundred civilians. More than 60,000 tons of bombs were eventually dropped on Rome before it was captured by Americans forces the following summer.

 

Born in 1921, Private Richard Wilbur served in World War II as an Army cryptographer with the 36th Texas Division. He participated in the landing on the Anzio beachhead and entered Rome on June 5, 1944, the day Mark Clark’s Fifth Army captured the city. The 36th took part in combat longer than any other division during the European campaign. Wilbur was already writing poems, and Italy remained a recurrent setting in his work.

 

On June 3, just south of Rome, a corporal in Wilbur’s division, Lloyd Tywater, was killed by German machine gunners a thousand yards from where Wilbur and others were laying wire to the 36^th’s advance command post. Tywater, 27, of Burleson, Texas, had once been a rodeo rider. Wilbur soon wrote an elegy, “Tywater,” included in his first collection, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (1947). It concludes:

 

“And what to say of him, God knows.

Such violence. And such repose.”